Up & Down a Lazy Concrete River Index
© 2007 by John Varley; all rights reserved
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Up & Down a Lazy Concrete River Index
© 2007 by John Varley; all rights reserved |
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May 16, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 1 The Los Angeles River is pretty much a joke, especially to people who live in LA. They say that back east there was a river that was so polluted that it caught fire one day. Probably an urban legend. But it is a fact that, most of the year, you can rollerblade or drive your car on the LA River. You've almost certainly seen it in the movies. |
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May 18, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 2 - Frogtown Riverside Drive runs parallel to I-5 on the west from Griffith Park for a while, passes beneath the 2 (Glendale Freeway), then ducks under the 5 where it passes Elysian Park, which contains Dodger Stadium. |
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May 21, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 3 - Los Feliz Another surprise: dotted along the Los Angeles River from the I-5 north are a lot of little pocket parks. These can range from just a little side path into the trees with a metal bench to sit on, up to a rather nice little playground with a huge, fanciful snake. |
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May 23, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 4 - DreamWorks Onward we forge, north by northwest up the wide Missouri, St. Louis only a Memory now. Our Companions, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, courageous Sacagawea, stout-hearted Toussaint Charbonneau, all the Army boys, and Semen (sorry, I mean Seaman), Lewis's faithful black Newfoundland. |
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May 25, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 5 - Bette Davis Burbank: Just across the river, between Riverside Drive and Rancho Avenue, is a little triangle of park land that bears the sign "Bette Davis Picnic Area." You're always running across stuff like that in the LA area. |
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May 28, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 6 - The Mouse We began the day where we'd left off the day before: Up to our ankles in horseshit. Well, not actually that deep, but there was a lot of it around, as we were now on the west side of the Equestrian Center, on the sawdust trail, horses to the right of us, horses to the left of us, horses in front of us and horses coming up behind us. |
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May 30, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 7 - From Johnny Carson to Warner Bros. The only question when we began the day was how far along the river we'd be able to walk. I knew the paths stopped somewhere ahead, but I didn't know how far. The ground rule we've established is that when the river can't be reached, we'll walk along side streets as close as we can. |
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June 1, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 8 - Toluca Lake We parked on a street called Screenland, in what Burbank calls the Media District. Warners, the Disney Channel, and scads of other smaller concerns, like the Dolby Company, are in that area. |
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June 4, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 9 - Wandering in the Wilderness This episode of Our Conquest of the Los Angeles Trickle ... er, river ... will encompass several days' of travel, as none of the individual days really added up to enough for an episode. The crocodiles and hippos must have been dozing, plus we rarely caught a good look at the river itself ... |
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June 6, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 9a - NOHO From time to time in our trek we will take a side trip, when something interesting presents itself, or when the river itself is just too damn dreary. |
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June 8, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 10 - Farmers Market Well, phooey! I had this document open, somewhere, and we went out to do some things around town. When I came back I tried to open it, and got a box that asked if I wanted to revert to the saved document. |
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June 11, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 11 - More Sherman Oaks Some days are more interesting than others. This was one of the least interesting. That happens, when you’re an intrepid urban explorer. As some Indian tribe used to say, some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you … |
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June 15, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 12 - Sepulveda Dam And so we reach the true wilderness, the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. Actually, it’s only wild right around the river, and only for about two miles. The rest is part wild marsh teeming with birds, and part recreation venues of various kinds, and part … golf. |
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June 19, 2007 - Up a Lazy Concrete River: Part 13 - Reseda, Tarzana Tarzana was chicken ranches and berry farms until Edgar Rice Burroughs bought it in 1915 and called it Tarzana Ranch, after his famous pulp fiction ape-man. In 1927 the residents of Runnymede renamed the town, and it’s Tarzana to this day, though it’s a part of LA now. |
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July 6, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 1 - Chinatown At last, we leave the Valley of the Shadow of Nudie and begin our journey down the river from the Elysian Park area. The next days promise to be a lot more interesting than the last ones. |
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July 11, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 2 - From Paris to Philly to Tokyo We parked in Chinatown and quickly made our way to the jail where Paris Hilton isn’t. Well, of course, there are thousands of jails where Paris Hilton isn’t—though if she continues the way she’s going she might see the inside of a lot more of them—but this is the one where she wasn’t most recently. |
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July 13, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 3 - The District District I think it may have started with SoHo in New York. It means “South of Houston,” which New Yorkers pronounce as House-ton, not Hus-ton. (Soho in London is not a contraction. It means “There goes the fox!” in English English.) |
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July 16, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 4 - The Backside of Los Angeles Our next-to-last day in Los Angeles didn’t show off the best side of the city. All cities have places like this, and maybe you’ve seen them, but probably as you sped through on your way to somewhere else, or possibly when you needed some oddball item from a warehouse carrying specialty merchandise. |
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July 20, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 5 - Vernon So far in our travels up and down the Los Angeles River we’ve been pretty much in Los Angeles, as you might expect. We’ve nipped into the southern borders of Glendale and Burbank, but that’s pretty much it. Upstream it’s LA all the way, though it’s broken up into a lot of neighborhoods. Downstream, it’s a different story. |
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July 23, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 6 - Five Towns I learned early on in our urban adventure to go to Google Maps and study the terrain, like any good general should, and map out the day’s campaign. With the satellite pictures I am sometimes able to tell if it will be possible to actually walk along the river … |
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July 27, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 7 - Four Towns, and Random Today we were joined in our peregrinations by our friend Random Turner-Jones. I wish we’d had a more interesting part of the river to walk, but you have to play the hand you are dealt. Unless you’re a card sharp. |
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August 1, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 8 - Where We Didn't See Coyotes … but I’m sure they were there. As with the jail where Paris Hilton wasn’t, there are, of course, many places where we haven’t seen wild coyotes, and two where we have: Death Valley, and Sauvie Island, outside of Portland. |
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August 3, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 9 - Farewell Compton, Hello Long Beach! Today it came to me in a flash why I avoid public transit most of the time. Especially in Los Angeles, whose transit system, though probably doing the best it can, covers a vast area so that some trips can take two hours or more. Actually, it was a pretty long flash .... |
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August 6, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 10 - Bixby Knolls The Red Line to 7th/Metro. The Blue Line to Del Amo Station. Can’t jaywalk across Del Amo because there’s a Highway Patrol car sitting right there, so it’s west to Santa Fe, around three corners of the intersection because there’s no pedestrian walkway where we need to go. |
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August 10, 2007 - Down a Lazy Concrete River: Part 11 - The Last Leg The title above is accurate in more ways than one. It would be the last leg of our epic riverwalk … and I was on my last leg. |
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August 13, 2007 - A Lazy Concrete River and Beyond: Twenty-six Miles Across the Sea We had thought that, having completed our journey that will surely go down in the annals of urban exploration, we ought to get some sort of reward. Since they don’t give out Olympic gold medals for Urban Walking Over a Period of Months (or at least not that I’m aware of), we’d have to take it upon ourselves to come up with a reward. |